🔺 The Consulting Pyramid Is Crumbling

For decades, consulting firms have followed a model that looked something like this:

Build a large base of junior talent.
Layer in consultants and managers to structure the work.
At the top, keep a small group of partners to direct the engagement and manage the client.

It was a model designed for scale.
Headcount meant leverage. Utilization drove margin. And prestige justified price.

But in the last year, I’ve seen that model start to shift.

Not because firms want to change it.
Because clients and technology are forcing the issue.

The bottom of the pyramid is under pressure

AI is already replacing much of the work traditionally handled by analysts and associates:

• Summarizing interviews and research

• Drafting slides, proposals, and reports

• Cleaning, modeling, and analyzing data

• Writing code, building models, testing ideas

What used to take a team of juniors now takes one person, and the right AI tools.

Clients are starting to notice.

The top is being challenged, too

Senior leaders aren’t immune from this shift.
Clients are asking harder questions than they used to.

Over the last few months, I’ve heard things like:

• “We’ve seen the decks. What are you actually building?”

• “Is your team using the same AI tools we already use internally?”

• “Don’t send four people. Send one person who can execute.”

This isn’t just about cost.
It’s about value.

Clients are less interested in process and more focused on outcomes.

The consulting pyramid was built for a different era

The model wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t built for this.

It assumed clients needed support across the entire workflow—from data to insights to recommendations.

It assumed firms had to build from scratch, every time.
It assumed scale was the only way to deliver value.
It assumed knowledge work was hard to automate.

Those assumptions no longer hold.

Today, clients can run their own research with AI.
They can generate insights in hours, not weeks.
And they can hire one person with the right tools instead of a team.

The old pyramid relied on labor.
The new one will rely on capability.

The real questions firms need to ask now

This shift isn’t just operational. It’s strategic.

Some of the most important questions I’ve seen firms wrestling with include:

• Which parts of our delivery model can be automated today?

• Are we still staffing junior roles to do work AI can handle?

• Are our consultants working with AI or around it?

• Could we deliver the same outcome with half the team?

• What do we believe clients will pay us for in 3 to 5 years?

• And what skills will we need to provide that?

These are not theoretical questions.
They’re shaping hiring, training, and project delivery in real time.

What the new model looks like

Firms that are adapting are starting to look different.

They’re not hiring more people. They’re building stronger teams.
They’re not optimizing utilization. They’re designing better workflows.
They’re not selling slide decks. They’re delivering embedded capability.

They’re doing things like:

• Flattening delivery teams

• Automating repeatable work

• Turning services into internal tools and external products

• Training teams to work with AI, not in spite of it

• Building capacity in client teams. Not dependency.

It’s not about replacing people.
It’s about making the right work easier to deliver. And the wrong work obsolete.

Questions Worth Asking Now

If you’re in a leadership role at a consulting firm, I’d love to hear what this looks like from your seat:

• What’s the first layer of your pyramid that’s being reshaped by AI?

• What client demands are different today than they were a year ago?

• What’s holding your teams back from using these tools in delivery?

That’s it for this week.

If you’re having similar conversations inside your firm or rethinking how your teams actually deliver, drop me a note. Always curious how others are approaching this.

And if someone in your world would find this useful, feel free to pass it along.

– Ash